RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/01/classified-documents-everywhere-but-only-one-hunter-biden/

Leaving Washington with classified documents must be a tradition for outgoing presidents and vice presidents. Sensitive government papers have now been found in the private homes and offices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Maybe every president going back for decades has taken documents he shouldn’t have. 

But only one has a crooked son who could have easily accessed those documents and used them to enrich himself and his corrupt family.

The public sure seems to believe that is the case. Six in 10 American voters are convinced it is likely that Biden’s son Hunter used information from the unsecured classified documents found in the current president’s Delaware home to sweeten “his foreign business deals.” Rasmussen Reports head pollster Mark Mitchell says the 60% figure is the “highest number we’ve ever seen implicating Joe Biden in anything.”

Republicans of course are overwhelmingly suspicious of Hunter Biden. But a large majority of independents, 62%, also believe that the president’s son used sensitive government documents to leverage his foreign business interests, according to the Rasmussen poll of 1,000 voters that was finalized over the weekend.

Voters also reckon that the Biden family has been “influence peddling for a decade.” Forty-three percent strongly agree with that statement while another 13% somewhat agree.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/31/the-third-golden-calf-gender/

Our previous two articles in this series dealt with the idol worship (i.e., secular religion) of Climate Change and Equity. Those symbolic Golden Calves at least have some connection to science and/or history. Although many climate initiatives are fatally flawed, and their supposed benefits grossly exaggerated, combatting atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation is a valid objective. And although the quest for Equity for all attempts to address problems rooted in history, its methods are more appropriate to the accretion of political power than justifiable remedies.

By contrast, the Cult of Gender is an attempt to displace reality with a bizarre reimagining of humanity. 

The current popular usage of the word “gender” is now a conflation of sexual attraction, an individual’s chosen persona, and biological sex which is baked into our DNA. This is a specious construction. Sex dictates or at least influences many bodily functions, characteristics, and behavior, although there is, of course, variation. Only a miniscule portion of humanity has ambiguous DNA, so sex is as innate a trait as there is.

By contrast, whom we are attracted to sexually may be a conscious choice or a deeply felt orientation, but it is independent of our sex. A lesbian does not become a male because she is attracted to women, nor is a gay man female. Similarly, the persona or identity we opt to project is very much a choice embodied in appearance and behavior. It need not align with our biology at all. Sex and gender are, therefore, not interchangeable.

Society today is increasingly tolerant of gender identities. As far as we know, nobody is attempting to pass legislation (or to enforce outdated laws) to constrain any adult’s consensual sexual practices. Likewise, there are no restrictions on how we dress or interact in private, although there are some limits when it comes to potentially offensive behavior or appearance in public, depending upon the audience. The application of social “norms” is admittedly a gray and controversial subject.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/31/the-left-struggles-to-shove-memphsis-killing-into-a-racist-narrative/

On Monday, the Washington Post sent an update to its email subscribers with the subject line: “The police officers charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols are black. Does it matter?”

The short answer is: Yes, but only to race hustlers on the left.

Which is why the Post enlisted three reporters who spent nearly 1,400 words twisting themselves into pretzels to explain how black police officers beating a black man to death was further proof of “systemic racism.”

Here’s how the Post puts it:

“The race of the five officers charged in the Nichols killing has prompted a complex grappling among black activists and advocates for police reform about the pervasiveness of institutional racism in policing.

“The widely viewed videos of the Nichols … spawned nuanced conversations among black activists about how systemic racism can manifest in the actions of non-white people.”

If you’re confused, join the club.

In trying to make the country view the Memphis death through a racial prism, the left not only manages to defy common sense but undermines everything it has been claiming about racist police officers. Namely, that systemic racism manifested itself in whites disproportionately targeting blacks, and the solution was more racial balance in police forces. Or to defund them altogether.

Not only were the officers involved in Nichols’ death black, the Memphis police force is 58% black, as is the police chief. And, as the Post admits, this was “the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64% black population.”

No matter. The reporters quote Samuel Sinyangwe, president of a group called Mapping Police Violence, saying that “diversifying law enforcement is certainly not going to solve this problem.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/justice-for-john-eastman/

The January 6 Committee may have shut up shop, Liz Cheney may have scuttled back to her constituency in Georgetown and at CNN, but the great Democratic vendetta machine is still fired up and pounding along, looking for people to smash and livelihoods to destroy.  

Those who dared to walk around the Capitol that fateful day are still being apprehended and jailed. Many face multi-year prison sentences for such misdemeanor torts as “parading” or “obstructing an official proceeding.” Anyone associated with Donald Trump is fair game, as the names Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jeffrey Clark remind us. 

At the top of that hit list is John Eastman, the distinguished constitutional scholar who made the unforgivable error of offering legal advice to President Trump in the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 election. 

I have written about Eastman before, both in this space and elsewhere. He has had his life turned upside down. He was shuffled out of his position as dean of the Chapman Law School and has been treated as a pariah by colleagues in his profession. Anti-Trump protestors regularly congregate at the foot of his driveway—fortunately, a long one—to vilify him and his association with the Bad Orange Man. 

Now the State Bar of California has announced that it has filed an official complaint of 11 charges against Eastman, alleging that he endeavored to “plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/29/anarchy-american-style/

The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.

The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.

The Establishment Is the Revolution

The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it? 

It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia. 

In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power—money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture—are in the hands of the Left. They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime. Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Students have no need to jam administrators’ offices because the latter, themselves, are as radical as the protestors and often lead them on in a top-down fashion. Had they not long ago demonstrated they were perfectly willing to subvert meritocracy, free expression, and equality under the law, they would not be occupying their present positions.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are not 1980s and 1990s “alternative” media geeks and hipsters creating neat gadgets for the people. They are not Steve Jobs and his pugnacious Apple battling the evil Microsoft or IBM, or the Macintosh commercial of 1984 depicting a maverick throwing a hammer into Big Brother’s screen. They are the Orwellian screen.

The current generation of techies is effectively Stalinist. Big Tech now colludes with the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the bureaucratic state to suppress free expression, warp balloting, and serve as contractors of government surveillance. Currently, the most totalitarian people in America are likely to wear flip flops, have a nose ring or pink hair, and disguise their fascism with ’60s-retread costumes.

There are no “armies of the night” marching on the Pentagon. Would-be demonstrators see no need, since radical identity politics, and gay, woke, and transgendered agendas are fast-tracked by the Department of Defense. 

There are no protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau or the “La Migra” anymore by advocates of illegal immigration, because the Left owns the border. And it has utterly destroyed it. There is no border, no border enforcement, and no meaningful immigration law. As many as 6 million illegal entries during the first two years of the Biden Administration are proof enough of that. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-lets-chinas-spies-slide/

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have dropped their case against a New York Police Department officer who had been accused of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of the Chinese regime,” The Epoch Times reports.

Baimadajie Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan and naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of Beijing, for wire fraud, making false statements, and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors charge that Angwang reported on Chinese citizens, cultivated intelligence sources, and connected Chinese officials with senior contacts in the NYPD.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York recently filed a motion asking federal judge Eric R. Komitee, a Trump nominee, to dismiss the indictment due to “additional information” on the case. The Eastern District did not reveal the information or explain its relevance to the case. So the move to dismiss may reflect official Biden policy of turning a blind eye toward Chinese espionage in the United States.

“The Justice Department is ending a controversial program, launched under the Trump administration, to hunt down Chinese spies,” CBS News reported in February of 2022.

President Trump’s “China Initiative,” targeted China’s theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.

As federal prosecutors charged in 2017, MIT professor Gang Chen failed to disclose ties to China and failed to disclose a foreign bank account on a tax document. Prosecutors dropped the case against Chen, but it wasn’t clear what motivated them to act. This was hardly the only proceeding against Chinese agents the DOJ chose to abandon.

In 2020, federal officials changed that Chinese national Tang Juan lied about ties to the Chinese military in order to gain access to the University of California at Davis. The FBI  found an April 14, 2019 article on a Xi’an, China, health care forum that showed Tang in a military uniform bearing the insignia of the Civilian Cadres of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The FBI also found two other articles listing Tang’s employer as the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force Medical University (AFMU), also known as the Fourth Military Medical University (FMMU).

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/01/29/are-the-walls-closing-in-on-joe-biden-new-details-raise-questions-n1666036

According to a story published on Saturday, the scope of Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal may be bigger than previously thought. Sources close to the investigation say in addition to classified documents, the FBI also seized notebooks from Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, which were reportedly written by Biden while he was vice president.

“The notebooks were seized because Biden’s notes on some of the pages relate to his official business as vice president, including details of his diplomatic engagements during the Obama administration, and may refer to classified information, this same person said, adding that the notebooks do not have classified markings on them, but some of the handwritten notes inside them could be considered as such given their sensitive content,” NBC News reported. “Other pages in the notebooks, while they may not contain potentially classified information, could still be considered government property under the Presidential Records Act because they pertain to official business Biden conducted as vice president, according to the person familiar with the investigation.”

According to Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives, if Biden shared the notes with staff while he was vice president, they would be considered official records belonging to the government.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/why_preserve_a_world_order_without_freedom.html

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants more money and weapons for Ukraine.  Recently standing in Kyiv alongside two (other?) Democrat senators — one who repeatedly lied about his service in Vietnam and another who repeatedly lied about President Trump being a Russian spy — Graham demanded American tanks on the ground immediately.  “World order is at stake!” he declared.  Something serious must be at stake over there; having thrown over a hundred billion dollars to a nation that was known universally as one of the most corrupt in the world before Russia crossed its borders last year, the U.S. government has become “pot committed” to a European war, whether financially struggling Americans care or not.

Just what is this “world order” that keeps Ol’ Lindsey up at night?  Surely he means some combination of American hegemony, military dominance, dollar-denominated financial supremacy, and command over the vaunted “rules-based international system” so-called Western leaders love to defend.  You never hear anything about the importance of defending Western rights and liberties, though, do you?  Senator Graham-nesty isn’t worried about protecting America’s borders.  He says absolutely nothing about securing Westerners’ freedoms from threats of tyranny.  Why?

Because America has relinquished its status as “leader of the free world.”  That is not because dementia-addled Joe Biden is merely a figurehead under the unelected Deep State’s control.  It is because there is no “free world” right now — at least not within the jurisdiction of political governments.  The political persecution of J6 protesters for “thought crimes,” the authoritarian COVID-1984 lockdowns and mandates, and the confirmation through the “Twitter Files” that the U.S. government is heavily invested in censorship and public manipulation all make this damning statement soberingly clear.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.”  American independence and the U.S. Constitution embraced this principle.  The “American experiment” was not devoted to creating a vast administrative State in which the expertise and benevolence of “public servants” would usher in a future Utopia.  “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness,” Ludwig von Mises observed, “no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”  Arguing otherwise has been the fool’s gold of both idealists and tyrants for millennia.  “Freedom is indivisible,” Mises argued.  “As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”  The American system broke with tyrannies of the past, and for doing so, an unelected, mercurial, deceptive, and vicious Deep State has spent decades breaking the American system.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/is_america_at_its_worst_economic_point_since_the_great_depression.html

Biden and the Democrats have been boasting about the economic wonders he and his administration have performed with their modernizing, equitable, diverse, green energy economic policies. However, E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, says that the devil is in the details—and the details behind the latest GDP report show that ordinary Americans are in the worst economic condition they’ve been since the Great Depression.

RNC Research (a very good Twitter feed, despite the RNC’s dismal performance in other areas) assembled a few clips showing Biden’s economic boasts:

In Bidenland, economically speaking, everything is hunky-dory. And maybe that’s true because Biden’s family has become fabulously wealthy, as have all the people surrounding him. It’s a very rosy view from up there, in the Oval Office.

It’s less rosy where real people live. Writing at Fox Business, Antoni says that the Fed’s most recent GDP (“gross domestic product”) report contains within it terrible news about America’s flailing economy.

What Democrats like is that the report shows that the economy is still growing, albeit slowly: “The latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. economy grew by 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, and 2.1 percent for 2022.” However, despite some growth, says Antoni, “economic growth is slowing down.”

https://justthenews.com/government/security/new-member-house-intelligence-committee-calls-security-damage-assessment-biden

Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), one of the newest members of the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee, is calling for a national security damage assessment on the Biden family, following the discovery of classified documents at multiple locations connected to President Biden.

“I think so,” Scott responded when asked Thursday on the John Solomon Reports podcast whether such an assessment should be made. “I would also tell you that the difference I see is that the Biden documents were in an area where other people clearly had access to them. And I have serious questions about the amount of wealth that the Biden family has.”

The Democratic president has been under increased scrutiny since the recent disclosures about such documents being found at his Delaware home and in an office he used after serving as vice president.

Biden, at least since his successful 2020 presidential bid, had been under scrutiny regarding whether he profited or stood to profit from son Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business negotiations including those with China. 

“I just don’t I don’t see how you accumulate that much making $175,000 a year,” Scott said about the president’s personal wealth. “I guess he made a little more as vice president, maybe $300,000 a year. But I don’t see how you accumulate that the type of wealth that he has.”

The FBI last August ceased classified document from former President Trump’s Florida home. And Vice President Mike Pence announced this week that a sweep of Indiana home had turned up such materials. 

Scott said that all people with classified documents need to be held accountable.